Update from the Lab: Dr. Jessica Hoffman

Follow our new series on research happening in the Department of Biology. Today's installment features recent papers from Dr. Jessica Hoffman (Postdoc in Dr. Austad’s Lab).

Follow our new series on research happening in the Department of Biology. Each story will broadly highlight a current study or papers that faculty members and graduate students have published as a result of their research findings.

Dr. Jessica Hoffman (Postdoc in Dr. Austad’s Lab)

“The Companion Dog as a Model for Human Morbidity and Mortality”

In this paper, we describe how causes of death and common morbidities compare between humans and pet dogs. We find that frequencies of causes of death are quite similar between the two species with the exception of cardiovascular disease which is rare in dogs. In addition, we discovered that many common chronic conditions in humans are also prevalent in canine populations. Overall, our results suggest dogs share many complex aging processes with humans, and as such, the dog may be an ideal translational model to study aging and longevity.

Learn More

Learn more about Dr. Jessica Hoffman (Postdoc in Dr. Austad’s Lab), our graduate students, and our research on the Department of Biology website.

Science in Motion

In China, as in the United States and the rest of the world, road traffic injuries are a leading killer of children five and over. And in more than one-fifth of cases, the children killed or injured are pedestrians, rather than vehicle occupants.

The metals industry built Birmingham after the Civil War, and biomedical research at UAB helped save the Magic City after the American steel industry collapsed a century later. Now, a UAB physicist is working on a project that ties these two economic pillars together — using DNA.

Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield, assistant professor in the Department of Biology, and colleague secure a $60,000 Binational Science Foundation Start-Up Grant to investigate the response to temperature and ocean acidification in the Levantine region of the Mediterranean Sea.

The premiere lecture in the new PAINTalks Speaker Series will feature Dr. Roger Fillingim, a world-renowned clinical researcher in the field of chronic pain and past-president of the American Pain Society.

A satellite or a spacecraft that better resists micro-meteor strikes. A new catalyst that lowers the cost of a major petroleum feedstock for plastics and slashes greenhouse gas emissions. These are possible payoffs from an inaugural collaboration between the University of Alabama at Birmingham and Southern Research.